Earlier in the week 518,000 tellies were set to Treasurer Josh Frydenberg clearing his throat and delivering the second reading of the appropriation bill (No. 1) 2020-21. Last night almost two hundred thousand televisions beamed with anything else than Australian politics.
In the ratings, Albo just nudged out the odd poverty porn reality program on SBS1, Queen Victoria’s Slums, where contemporary punters are rendered destitute in late 19th Century urban privation, leaving Australian viewers with the difficult choice — shall we watch Albo or watch someone die of consumption? Decisions, decisions.
I chose life. To be sure, Albo delivered a handsome oratory, one for the faithful. The spectre of Albo’s father figure, the great man, Tom Uren was summoned. This no doubt brought a tear to many Labor eyes of a certain age. The youngsters, perhaps not so much. I could show you the demographic breakdown of Albo’s TV audience last night and it makes for grim reading.
What are you going to do? Kids these days.
The centrepiece of the budget-in-reply was a $6.2bn childcare plan with childcare subsidies raised for all families earning under $530,000 a year. It is what Labor calls universal childcare providing subsidies of 90 per cent of the cost of childcare to almost all families.
Almost the entirety, or the everyone over there except the couple in the Maserati childcare doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, so Labor decided to make it easier for scribblers and subs across the country and refer to it as universal childcare.
What Albo or indeed any commentators this morning have failed to hit upon is his plan replaces the Shorten plan Labor took to the electorate last year that cost a couple of billion less and produced similar outcomes, giving families with toddlers earning up to $174,000 per annum 100 per cent of the rebate and an average saving in the order of $1500 a year.
Certainly, the Shorten childcare policy was less universal than Albo’s less than universal childcare policy but not by much and seems to allow just the lucky few earning a tick over half a million a year, some delicious Commonwealth dollars.
Never mind the waste, feel the social justice, Albo says, declaring childcare not as welfare but as an economic measure driving workplace productivity ever skyward. Never mind also that Albo’s future falls part of a possible past had the wee man from Maribyrnong got the chocolates last year.
Labor should probably also try to forget that Shorten’s a bit less universal policy than Albo’s was designed to capture electoral imaginations and win over young mums and women countrywide last year but barely caused a blip on the screen during the campaign, not when the vote counting started either.
In Albo’s world we will also be building trains in Australia which we used to but generally don’t anymore, even though the ones built in Melbourne recently, ticked off by the Victorian government, look like rolling prison hulks.
But Albo can be forgiven for hurling cash around. Economists drier than Smith’s Salt and Vinegar Crinkle Cuts swore off the smelling salts and put their conniptions aside at the spendathon which was the Frydenberg budget where all the economic levers the Liberal Party can think of have been rushed in to fight the good fight.
If you ever ask the Liberal Party what kind of fiscal policy they prefer, you are bound to get the Blues Brothers’ response: “We like both kinds. Tax cuts AND business write-offs.”
That aside, what this means is it is a terrible time to be in opposition now but it might be quite a nice spot in a year’s time if the government doesn’t pull the pin and call an early election in the meantime.
These possible futures remain in the deep unknown and beg the question of Labor’s almost universally dismal luck in timing.
No better example exists than the Scullin Government elected to power with a thumping majority in 1929. Prime Minister-elect James Scullin took off from Spencer Street Station to a cheering crowd. By the time the train pulled into Canberra Station, Wall Street had crashed and the Great Depression had begun.
Three years later Scullin’s majority and Labor’s representation in the lower house was reduced to a cricket team with a twelfth man and a scorer.
Within a year of Whitlam coming to power a bear market crash compounded by the House of Saud and the Egyptians conspiracy to use oil as a weapon to punish anyone who supported the state of Israel.
Kevin Rudd was in the PMO, sitting cross-legged, happily illustrating children’s books when he took a look at the ticker tape and found the Global Financial Crisis had started. The world’s banking system was on pills for its nerves and in many countries, customers were declining tellers’ offers of the office furniture instead of the money held in their accounts.
The Rudd Government went supply side ballistic. Money was misspent, the dead were flush with government hand-outs, and hastily assembled infrastructure projects turned out to be expensive duds. In one case, the Environment Department which until then had spent most of its time printing lovely colour brochures was asked to roll out a nationwide program which managed to kill several people.
For all that, the economy remained in the red, spending just one quarter in the negative and the great scourge of all recessions, enduring and high levels of unemployment was not realised.
Having survived the bedevilment of terrible timing and the prospect of a crushing defeat, the Labor Party did the only thing they could do, knifed a popular leader on the eve of an election and self-destructed on the spot.
So maybe timing isn’t everything in politics. Maybe judgment has got a bit to do it with it, too.
Albo finds himself prisoner of the former and subject to the hard rules of the latter. No one is talking elections just yet which means the government is almost certainly whispering about it. Albo’s time is yet to come and if it comes it will almost certainly come at a time of dreadful economic circumstances. Until then it’s a case of nice speech, shame about the timing.
Merz steps up, crunch point near
New German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s frank assertion at the G7 summit – that in attacking Iran, ‘Israel is doing the dirty work for all of us’ – provided a welcome reality check.
Chalmers’ ambitious drive to boost living standards
Jim Chalmers’ admission that Labor’s budget ‘is not sustainable’ has raised hopes that the productivity roundtable will be part of significant reforms to boost growth and strengthen the economy and defend living standards.
These are not good times to be in opposition. There are few headlines to be had, a wisecrack or two to the cameras per day if one is lucky and maybe, just maybe, a three second grab on the nightly news.